The combined voice of two thousand theris and mages gave one response to EventTheExecutiveOrder: "No. And if you make us, there will be war."

There very nearly was.

But ultimately, EventTheMeeting's show of unity and resistance held. Both serious analysts and popular media panicked, fixating on wild but suddenly plausible scenarios about teleported nuclear bombs, shapeshifting terrorists and even (less plausibly) pets rising up against their owners. Redwing promised Americans that theris would take no action unless the government did something stupid, and milked the controversy over the Order for all it was worth.

Americans don't take well to being threatened, so the government initially rattled a few sabers -- but the White House was ultimately unwilling to start a war that could end with the Capitol a smoking crater. Redwing refused to budge, and the Order was rescinded as gracefully as circumstances would allow.

It was an incredible victory for theri rights, but it came at a high cost. The brinkmanship poisoned the political atmosphere, giving anti-theri groups a rallying cry. Another weekend of unrest rippled across the nation, with demonstrations taking a darker and more directly anti-theri edge. Hate crimes, too, saw an immediate spike.

Politicians, bowing to popular anger, scrambled to pass nakedly discriminatory and restrictive laws -- dancing the razor's edge of theri war and human uprising. Redwing proved equally unwilling to start a war that would decimate the country he loved and permanently stain theris as mass murderers, and backed down himself after issuing a few veiled warnings.

As is usually the case with symbolic laws, politicians' solutions were largely unconstitutional or unenforceable. Courts immediately blocked the most excessive of the new laws, and prepared to pounce on the rest. So the end result of all the tension was a legal framework much like the old one but more ominous. Theris and humanity's self-styled defenders stayed frozen in a standoff that would remain motionless for weeks and bitter for months.

This era's end was a landmark, too -- of an entirely different sort. Denny Brogi's teleportation accident at first received very little attention, and was seen as a mere curiosity by those who did notice. But that one moment of carelessness would cascade into CulturaliaTheDeathOfTeleportation, and by raising fear of safety concerns, would broadly alter the magical -- and political -- landscape.

While EraDragonInTheStreets may have caused more uncertainty and even panic, this era is the leader in terms of raw fear. Humans fixate on the threat of Redwing's war; theris fixate on the threat of internment, and later the political backlash. With the stakes so high, everyone finds it easy to assume the worst of their opponents.

History would definitely record EventTheMeeting as a two-edged sword. It prevented an era of open theri repression (and quite possibly a broader slide into fascism), but it also left Americans frightened of revolution -- and seeing therianthropes as a threatening force beyond anyone's control. The wording of Redwing's declaration, with its mention of war, was ready evidence for those looking for evil intentions; Redwing and other major theri figures would spend the next few months trying to fight fundamentalists' and reactionaries' "I told you so"s.

Like Vietnam, the divisions drawn in this era would be felt long after the immediate conflict faded. The possibility of open war evaporated quickly, but such things as the EventGoldMurders (and later, the GroupHumanEvolutionFront manifesto) kept alive the dire warnings that theris had shadowy plans to subjugate humanity under an iron claw. Even a decade later, some of those wounds would still be fresh; America's opposition to the EventNewAtlantisRaising would be based in no small part on 1997's distrust and paranoia.

In short, don't overlook the full impact of The Meeting. Politically, it would be as pivotal as The Changes themselves were, and it would cause nearly as many problems for theris as it solved. In this era, the backlash is as strong as it ever will get, and theris are on the receiving end of a great deal of (both anonymous and face-to-face) hostility. The chasm between theris/mages and the unchanged seems almost unbridgeable.